At Marketo, we understand that sharing knowledge with your peers is a great way to help accelerate learning. That’s why we partnered with our 2018 Marketo Champions to pull together a new ebook that dives into how you can leverage Marketo like some of our top performers. The new ebook, titled the [Marketo Success] Guide, provides detailed insights on everything from setting up email templates to which reports you should be pulling to prove your impact on revenue. Check out an excerpt from the ebook below written by Erik Heldebro, Chief Marketing Officer at Bambuser andRachel Noble, Manager Client Services at Digital Pi to learn how they manage engagement program memberships in Marketo.

Managing Engagement Programs

Nurture programs aren’t just hard to conceive. They can be hard to manage, too, especially if you don’t have a program set up for just that purpose. We call this a Nurture Traffic Controller, and here’s how to build one:

Create a Default Operational Program named Nurture Traffic Controller.

In the new program, create three folders: Smart Campaigns, Smart Lists, and Reports.

In the Smart Lists folder, create a Smart List named “1. Nurture Target Audience.” The Smart List criteria should include anyone who would potentially qualify for any nurture program. We’ll specify which program later. Remember that Marketo filters out Unsubscribed, Marketing Suspended, and Blacklisted leads automatically.

If you have one Engagement Program that everyone goes into, skip to step 5. Otherwise, you will need to create additional target audience Smart Lists to identify which Engagement Program qualified leads should go into. For example, if you have an Engagement Program specifically for VP’s, create a Smart List “2. VP Target Audience.”

In the Smart Campaigns folder, create a new Smart Campaign named “1. Add Qualified Leads to Nurture.”

Smart List:

Flow:

If you have a generic nurture program, your only Flow step should be: Add to Engagement Program -> Generic Engagement Program, Stream=Stream 1. Add choices to determine which stream if you have multiple streams.

If you do not have a generic nurture program, you can use the Smart Lists you created in step 4 to identify which program they should go into

Add to Engagement Program If Member of Smart List A, Engagement Program A Stream = Stream 1 and so on. Like in (i), you can also add choices to determine which stream if any of these programs have multiple streams.

6. Schedule this to run recurring just before the cast of the nurture program(s). If the casts are not consistent, consider scheduling this daily. Remember that the campaign is set so people can only run through once, so you don’t have to worry about this re-assigning everyone to new nurture programs each time it runs.

7. If you don’t have any other nurture programs, you’re done! Otherwise, we need to set up transition rules to get people into the correct nurture program. For each additional nurture program, we need to create a new Smart Campaign to transition leads who qualify:

And that Smart List referenced in Flow step #1?

Now your leads will be in the right Engagement Programs!

Engagement Program Checklist

When setting up your Engagement Programs, here’s a checklist you can use to make sure you have everything you need.

Engagement Program built

Content Streams created

Unsubscribed/Invalid Stream created

Transition Rules defined

Smart Campaign to track success at the Engagement Program level built and activated

Emails added to nested Default Programs within the Engagement Program

Smart Campaigns to track success at nested Default Program level built and activated

We hope you enjoyed reading this excerpt from the upcoming [Marketo Success] Guide: Best Practices from Marketo Champions. Keep an eye out for more tidbits from the new ebook that is launching in late 2018. Have questions about the content? Let us know in the comments!